'X-Men: First Class' Director Wanted To Make A Young Wolverine Movie

Matthew Vaughn helped revitalize the X-Men movies with X-Men: First Class, and if he had stuck around then the follow-up movie could have been very different.

Vaughn co-wrote the next film in the X-Men series, X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it was original X-Men director Bryan Singer who returned to direct the movie while Vaughn helmed Kingsman: The Secret Service instead.

“The reason I haven’t done sequels in the past is they just weren’t exciting me,” Vaughn told Collider. “And on Days of Future Past, even though I co-wrote the bloody thing, the reason I bailed out of it is two things: First, I respect Bryan Singer hugely and X-Men is Bryan’s world and I feel he let me play in his sandbox. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my sandbox. I wanted my own sandbox.”

The other reason is that, despite the writing credit, X-Men: Days of Future Past wasn’t actually the X-Men movie he wanted to make. The movie he wanted to make involved a young Wolverine.

“And, second, I didn’t want to do Days of Future Past next,” he said. “I felt that one should be in a trilogy and Days of Future Past should be the finale of that story. I would have done a film in-between where you meet the young Wolverine and a new character, and then Days of Future Past became the young Wolverine and the old Wolverine and just really blow it out.”

Even so, Vaughn says Singer’s final cut of X-Men: Days of Future Past is pretty close to how he imagined it.

“Bryan [Singer] did a few things, which I thought weregenius that weren’t in my script,” Vaughn said. “I had Juggernaut breaking into the Pentagon, he changed it to Quicksilver and did that fucking brilliantly, I have to add. My idea was the sentinels at the end, I wanted them to look like Mystique. I thought there should be thousands of Mystiques attacking them in the future. He changed a few more of the mutants, but it was pretty close. Yeah, it was pretty close.”

The trilogy that began with X-Men: First Class did ultimately end with the Singer-directed X-Men: Apocalypse. That film concluded one trilogy and began a new cinematic X-Men arc, which will continue in X-Men: Dark Phoenix next year.

Meanwhile, Vaughn is currently promoting his Kingsman sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which opens in theaters on September 22, 2017.

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